What is the best ________ in the world?

Recently I had received some questions on my blog which tended to be along the theme of "what is the best job/country in the world?" I find such questions impossible to answer because it completely depends on the individual - what is right for one person, may be totally wrong for another. You see, everything is so subjective. You may as well ask me, "what is the best dish in the world?" My answer would be Laksa, of course. For me, nothing beats an authentic Singaporean Laksa. But then again, some people may not like Laksa, especially if they are not fond of spicy food or if they cannot stand the overpowering smell of sambal belachan. So all I can say is that Laksa is my favourite dish, but it would be wrong for me to say that it is the best dish in the world because I can only speak for myself.

Why do people ask the wrong questions then?

Now let's talk about countries for a start: I was recently asked why I preferred living in the UK by one of my readers - now this was a loaded question because I knew the person who asked me isn't really interested in me per se, no we don't know each other. He is just keen to procure useful information for himself to find out if he may be missing out on something, if he would indeed be happier or better off if he left Singapore to live in another country. Really, one can only talk about which country is most suitable for an individual, because we need to recognize the fact that we are all individuals with different abilities, characters and needs. I'm going to use my parents as an example: now Singapore is the best country in the world for them because they are simply unable to function anywhere else. My parents are limited by their language skills, my dad doesn't speak any English and my mother's English (well, Singlish) is somewhat limited. More to the point, my mother is very slow at learning anything new and being autistic, she is obsessed with keeping things to a fixed routine. She feels very safe and comfortable with predictable routines - she wants to know exactly how she can get things done and she doesn't like having to learn anything unfamiliar. Gosh, I remember how long it took her to feel confident enough to change trains at Raffles Place or City Hall MRT stations on her own. Now that's the kind of thing that Singaporeans just take for granted, they know exactly how to get off one train and get on the next one with ease, but for my mother it was so scary back when she first did it on her own.

You get the idea - so I can safely say that Singapore is the only country in the world where my mother can live at all, so when there's only one country on that list, by default, it makes Singapore the best country in the world for my mother to live in. So in her opinion, yeah Singapore is clearly the best country in the world to live in. I can wax lyrical about how modern, organized and efficient Japan is, but unless you're able to speak Japanese fluently, you're not able to adapt to life in Japan so Japan wouldn't be a nice place for you to live in. One of my favourite Youtubers are this lovely Canadian couple Simon and Martina, formerly of Eat Your Kimchi fame, now they run Eat Your Sushi. They lived 7 years in Korea as expatriates and created a Youtube channel to share their adventures in Korea with their friends and family back home in Canada. Their quirky videos became such a hit and soon they were able to give up their jobs as English teachers to become full time Youtubers. Simon and Martina both mastered Korean to an extremely high standard in their time in Korea and in 2015, they announced that they were moving to Japan to continue their adventures in Asia - two years later and they are having a brilliant time in Tokyo, still making great Youtube videos. Their Japanese is improving rapidly (though Martina's Japanese is better than Simon's), they're a brilliant example of how a couple can just move to a new country, learn a new language, find work and become very successful there.

Simon and Martina are clearly extremely talented people - they have a unique set of skills which involve not just the technical aspects of creating quality videos that connect with their audience, but they understand social media and they have so much charisma on camera. They understand marketing and how to create a brand, they have even opened a cafe in Seoul. Furthermore, they mastered Korean to a very high standard very quickly and are now doing the same with Japanese (and Simon speaks Polish too on top of that). I love the way they make Korean and Japanese culture so accessible to an English-speaking audience who like Korean and Japanese culture but don't quite speak the languages. They did comment in their videos how they adore Japan and so if you were to ask them if Japan is a nice country in the world to live in, of course they're going to tell you it is amazing. But if you were to ask someone like my mother whether she'd like to live in Japan, it would be an ultimate nightmare for her as she would hate everything about life in Japan from the food to the weather to the language barrier. Japan clearly suits Simon and Martina, but it wouldn't be right for my mother at all. Same country, totally different reactions. As for myself, yeah I'd love to live and work in Japan for a few years if given the opportunity. What scares my mother about Japan most is the language barrier - that's the very thing that would excite me about Japan: the challenge to pick up a new language quickly. 

But let's talk about another question now: which is the best job in the world? Let's stay with Simon & Martina for a moment - I think being a Youtuber is a pretty awesome job. They seem to be always having amazing adventures and sharing these via Youtube with their subscribers. I may have had a boring or even stressful day at work, but I can escape to another world by watching one of their adventures on Youtube. Can you imagine being filmed having really fun adventures all the time for a living? Even I have tried making my own Youtube videos, only with very limited success and I certainly don't have the kind of hit rates that Simon and Martina get on any of their videos - so even if I wanted to do what they do, guess what? I can't even when I try my best. It still baffles me that I get much better hit rates for my blog than my Youtube channel, that I can't persuade my readers to watch my Youtube videos as well, but that's social media for you. It simply reflects the fact that Simon and Martina are really good at what they are doing and it is simply not easy to emulate their success. Thus I suppose I'm better off sticking to what I do best in marketing & PR: making other people and their products look good rather than try to market myself as a product to the public.

But perhaps you'd like to do what I do for a living: which is essentially sales & marketing in the world of corporate finance, focusing on distribution. Whilst admittedly it may not be as fun as being a Youtube superstar like Simon and Martina, it is at least very lucrative (and thus rewarding). I have the money to climb up the property ladder, indulge in luxuries and go on fun holidays all the time. But a large part of what I do involves being able to speak to clients around the world in a variety of languages and I do speak ten languages, Anyone can try to do sales, it is potentially a very lucrative job - the shop assistant in your local shop is doing sales, but to sell a sophisticated investment product in so many countries and earn the kinds of commissions that I do, well that's where the languages come in. Perhaps the shop assistant selling mobile phone accessories, earning a pitiful amount of commission would like to deal with more high value products like me, but if they do not have the requisite skills to do what I do, that option is simply not open to them. So even if they applied to my company and offered to do my job for far less money, guess what? My directors are simply going to turn them down (or ignore them, knowing my directors) because when it comes to highly skilled jobs, without the right skills, you simply cannot deliver the desired results. Skills in the sales, marketing and PR world may not be quantified the way they are in say engineering or medicine, but the proof is in the pudding: give the same product to a less skilled, less experienced person and they simply will not be able to flog it quite the same way I can.

Do you think you could work in finance like me?

Turning back to my parents - well, they both worked all their lives as primary school teachers. It was a good choice for them, the package primary school teachers were offered at that time was very respectable, they loved the long school holidays and were able to spend a lot of time together, working in the same school all those years. More to the point, neither of my parents were particularly well educated or intelligent (and with the both of them probably being quite autistic), but they had found a job that they were both competent at, in an environment where they felt very safe in, it could be said that it was definitely the best career choice for them. But they went as far as to claim that they had one of the best jobs in the world - I rolled my eyes and bit my tongue, I didn't want to put them down. Could my father have worked as a lawyer, doctor or engineer? No way. Could my mother ever work in banking, media or journalism? Not in a million years. Heck, despite being a primary school teacher, my mother often made mistakes in her English and I could only describe what she speaks as Singlish rather than standard English. So whilst being a primary school teacher clearly isn't the best job in the world (not by a long way), it was the best option for my parents and for what it is worth, I am glad they took it because there are enough people out there stuck in miserable jobs that they hate. 

So turning back to the reader who asked me the question, well whatever answer I give him will be pretty meaningless because he's so different from me. Given what he has revealed about himself, it seems that he has far more in common with my parents than he does with me - so by that token, Singapore is probably the best country in the world for him because he is totally unable to survive anywhere else given his lack of education and skills; and that he's probably best off trying to find a stable but simple job that will give him some element of financial stability in the long run, given that he'll never ever become a successful professional in the long run. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but it is the truth. Th problem with such people is that they also lack the ability to see things from another person's point of view: I suffer that a lot from my parents who have never ever been able to see anything from my point o view. I excuse them because I am 100% sure they are totally autistic and the inability to empathize with another person is a classic sign of Asperger's syndrome. That explains why I have a distant and cold relationship with them - they take very little interest in what I do in my life because I find it impossible to try to relate to them. They expect me to indulge them emotionally without giving anything in return - look, I'm sorry, but that's not how normal human relationships work.

Are you able to see things from another person's POV?

Perhaps I am stating the obvious, but the answer for "which is the best country/job for me" will be different for every single person because we all have different characters, needs, desires, and personalities. It is almost as meaningless as asking a question like, "which is the best ice cream flavour in the world" - ask ten people and you might get ten answers. I remember my surprise when I introduced a good friend of mine to my favourite ice cream flavour: white chocolate and lavender by Latte & Miele. Upon tasting it, he looked completely underwhelmed and said nonchalantly, "nothing special, but hey I'm glad you're enjoying it." But I guess I'm the first who gets flustered when somebody asks me a dumb question like, "how did you get your British passport?" When they ask such a question, they're really asking, "tell me what you did, so I can do the same thing and get a British passport too." I usually start by telling them that it all started when I got my scholarship to come to the UK to do my degree and a major factor of me getting that scholarship was because I was a three-time national champion gymnast in Singapore, so if they wanted to do what I did, they had better find their nearest gymnastics club and start training hard - maybe in about 10 years, they might make the national team if they are talented enough. Gosh, can you see how ridiculous some of these questions are?

So, that's it from me on this topic. Why do you think so many people are asking the wrong questions then? Is it because they are totally unable to see things from another person's point of view? Or do they simply lack the basic confidence to trust in their own judgement and listen to themselves? Or perhaps they have always had people in their lives telling them what to do, to the point where they have never ever asked themselves the simple question, "what is best for me?" Are they simply so busy trying to please others they have never ever considered what they would suit them best? Or are they plain stupid in trying to find shortcuts in life by copying others? Are you confident enough to find out what is best for you in life? Let me know what you think, do leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.